Understanding the Simple Business Dashboard

Learn about the quick and easy business cash flow, balance, and category insights on the Tiller Simple Business Dashboard

Written by Heather Phillips Updated over a week ago

Gain Income and Expense Insights

The Tiller Simple Business dashboard allows you to quickly gain insights on how your business is performing. Understand your cash flow, income vs expense, income by category group, and expenses by category group all based on a customizable time ranges with readily-available presets.

The dashboard also gives you an at a glance account balance information as well as income vs expense reporting.

Insights in the Dashboard Sidebar

Uncategorized Transactions Alert

The left sidebar of the dashboard gives a few indicators and helpful information. If you have uncategorized transactions for the period selected below cash flow calculation you’ll see a red bar indicating how many transactions, and their amount sum, are waiting to be categorized. Categorizing transactions is key to an accurate financial picture.

Income and Expense

The income and expense chart shows you your income vs expense totals over the selected time period.

Configure the time period below the cash flow calculation. You won’t see any data here until you categorize transactions that occurred during the selected time period.

Cash Flow

The cash flow calculation is your income minus your expenses based on the time range selected below the cash flow amount. It's the numeric difference between the two graphed income and expense values above it.

Current Balances List

The Current Balance list in the sidebar shows you the current balance for accounts you're tracking in the Accounts Sheet. It is pulling data from the Accounts sheet and the Transactions sheet.

There are two balances shown: Tiller and Bank. The Tiller balance is calculated based on the latest balance history entry for the account and any uncleared transactions you may have manually entered that are waiting to be reconciled. The Bank balance is the last available balance for the account from the Accounts sheet.

Dashboard Charts and Reports

The main area of the Dashboard includes several easy to use and customizable reporting charts.

Inflows vs. Outflows (top left)

Upon immediately opening the Tiller Simple Business Spreadsheet, this chart compares inflows vs. outflows on a month-by-month basis for All Transactions over your selected time range.

This is the default filter setting that is only looking at the sign of the transaction amount. If you switch the filter setting to "Categorized Income & Expenses" you will only see data once you have categorized some transactions that occurred during the selected time range.

How to use it:

Configure the time range using the dropdown option below the chart to change the data set that’s graphed in the chart. If you choose “custom”, editable start and end date options will appear.

Configure the filter by choosing All Transactions, which only looks at the amount data, or Categorized Income & Expenses, which charts the data based on how you’ve categorized it (income and expense only) on the Transactions sheet.

Category Focus (top right)

The Category Focus chart is a powerful tool for zooming in on certain financial aspects of your business. As with the Income vs. Expense chart, you can choose either a time range preset or specify a “Custom” time range. Category Focus includes a powerful filtering capability to show month by month transactions filtered by:

By “All”, “All Categorized” or “All Uncategorized”: these options are useful for cashflow analysis and also to see how many transactions have not yet been categorized.

By Income: show any single income category.

By Expense: show any single expense category.

Income By Category Group (bottom left)

The Income By Category Group pie chart shows you where your income is coming from within the selected time range. This chart really comes alive if you have income from multiple sources (clients, stores, etc) and you leverage category groups to organize key income categories.

How to use it:

Refine the income categories for your business on the Categories sheet.

Organize income categories into groups like “Investments”, “Revenue”, “Acquisition” on the Categories sheet.

Categorize income transactions.

Configure the time range using the dropdown option below the chart on the Dashboard to update the data that’s included in the chart.

The Total $ field in the upper right shows the total value of the income pie within the selected time range.

Expense By Category Group (bottom right)

The Expense by Category Group chart is useful understanding your relative spend across key expense category groups for the selected time range.

How to use it:

Refine the expense categories for your business on the Categories sheet.